Discussions

Under the terms of the agreement, eBay is to use the technologies Microsoft has developed as part of its .Net platform. The company also said it would also adopt Windows 2000 server technology, as well as the Microsoft Passport online security system.

It will be interesting to see how will eBay manage to integrate their predominantly Unix and Java architecture with the .Net and Passport products.
Any ideas from people more up-to-date with eBay's architecture?

Let's watch the site die every second day.
I think eBay is doing a "terrible" mistake for going with MS. Just look at what they tried to do with hotmail and Solaris was to the rescue. I don't see any MS technology being able to run hugely accessed sites.

It is not that anybody is hatin' any technology for own individual purposes or neither anybody is prejudiced. many companies are followin' the same suite, but every one is afraid of the MSFT operating systems endurance and reliability and this is a hard known fact! The loop holes in the security systems, the scalability issue etc etc. For a long standin' time unix (or solaris) has been a widely embraced OS for scalablity and reliability in all aspects.
This is the real test to check out how well Win2K will crash and how often!! So we can say eBay is benchmark company to test the anomalies of win2k! Good luck eBay!!

Says who, besides you and Microsoft? Oracle claims to be 3 times faster than SQLServer. They're offering US$1M as a "guarantee" (read: marketing gimmick).

> Developing web services using Microsoft .NET is a million
> times easier than what you can do in Java.

I cannot comment too much on this, since I have not investigated .NET at all. One thing, though: explain to me what a "web service" is. It's a catchphrase that Microsoft coined, if I'm not mistaken, and everyone is using it now.

The "web" as we know it today is completely utterly irrelevant. The "web" as we know it today is dead. HTTP is a *horrible* protocol to be building large systems over, yet because it's the only thing we can count on as being ubiquitous, it's what we develop to.

Microsoft systems have a track record of shitting the bed, plain and simple. I'm still open-minded enough to at least give it a go. I've got a win2k machine at home that is a million times more stable than anything else Microsoft has done, but it still falls well short of what I'd expect in any kind of system that is important to anyone. I'm using linux at the moment (personal preference, that's all), but this machine dual-boots win2k as well.

I have been in the IT business long enough to have developed my own "predictions" based on patterns and trends that I'm seeing. Here's what I've seen over the past 10 years or so, based on my experiences as a systems integrator, system admin, and software developer (Note that this is from the perspective of an "Enterprise" developer, not someone developing consumer-grade software):

1986. Sun is young, hot, and people are talking about unix replacing VMS, Novell, and older, larger mainframe-based systems. Windows? Isn't that the GUI thing that looks a little like a Mac? Feh, we'd just as soon build our systems on an Atari 2600.

1990. Novell is still strong... stronger than ever, maybe. Unix is getting more popular, though. Sun is the main drive behind the unix market.

1993. Microsoft has been talking about Windows NT (New Technology, if I recall correctly, expands the acronym) for a couple years now, and they've released a beta of NT 3.1. (At least that was my first exposure to it.)

1995. Some ISP's are talking about using NT mainly because it's what Microsoft is doing, and nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft. I watched an ISP fall to its knees trying to support a meager 10,000 dialup customers on a farm of the best intel-based machines money could buy... running NT 3.51. I took two weeks and migrated them to linux (to support their investment in intel machines) and one old SPARC2 running SunOS 4.1.3_U1. That was the SMTP and POP3 server.

1996 (or was it '97?). Microsoft released NT4. It's a huge improvement over 3.51, and Microsoft is pushing its astoundingly low TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). Gates claims that one system administrator is needed for every 100 NT servers.

Java blasts onto the scene. My career path goes from being a systems admin to a systems integrator and software developer. Java did that to me. =)

1997. Many, many small to midsize organizations are flocking to NT, away from the expensive archaic unix systems, despite my counsel to the contrary.

1998. After watching corporate productivity shit the bed because (voice heard over the PA system): "Please stop working until further notice, the print server crashed"... and watch the 18GB scandisk go... 2 HOURS DOWNTIME! Ouch. That happened once in some places, more in others, before they began to realize that they've been hoodwinked by the paid-for-by-advertising trade rags, most heavily laced with various Microsoft ads... and started migrating back to unix-based systems. Sun has released a new line of "affordable" workstations. Linux is hot and starting to gain credibility.

2000-2001. Java is screaming hot. Linux is screaming hot. Tech stocks are taking a beating (just a normalization of the previously over-inflated bogus stock prices, imo). Win2k has been released (ok, in 1999). It's a huge improvement over NT4, at least stability-wise. The same crappy (and unmodifiable) UI though. Wireless is the next big thing. .NET and XBOX are Microsoft's latest vapourware announcements. .NET looks like it might do something, but then so did NT. Of course, .NET is quite obviously intended to surreptitiously seduce people over to the all-Microsoft way of things again. They claim that it's "language-neutral" yaddayaddayadda... but at the end of the day, the end-result, if .NET and Microsoft are successful, we're all running Windows{ME|2000|98|??}.

No thank you.

I can say that I will be investigating .NET in short order. I'd be a fool not to. What if it is more suitable for some things than Java?

1993 - Microsoft promises a ship date of 1995 for its new OO based OS called Cairo

1994 - Cairo ship date is said to be on target

1995 - Microsoft states that Cairo may be delayed until 1996

1996 - Microsoft said they meant 1997

1997 - Microsoft states a new ship date of Cairo in 1999

1999 - Microsoft ships Windows 2000. When asked about Cairo, Microsoft responds by saying that despite having "ship dates", Cairo was always meant a specification and not a product. Microsoft then states that Windows 2000 meets the all the Cairo specs...except the whole "based on OO" promise.

Of course (not to rip on just Microsoft), in 1993-4 Sun and NeXT made a big push with their OpenStep agreement. Then a little technology called Java put an end to OpenStep.

Microsoft SQL Server is 3 times faster than the last posted benchmark in the TPC-C rankings. Microsoft was also using a shared-nothing architecture which A) is known to exploit the nature of TPC-C, B) is typically not realistic in a real world configuration that has data hot spots, C) is an architecture that Oracle doesn't support (they're shared-disk).

Shared-disk architectures have traditionally been slower at TPC-C in clusters because they haven't solved the "database ping" problem when implementing cache coherency between nodes. Oracle 8i fixes this for read/write conflicts, and 9i fixes this for write/write conflicts. We may yet see a renaissance of shared disk architectures in 2002...

To see the result of switching to MS technologies goto Lycos.com. I am their regular user. Since they have shifted onto Windows 2000 the site has become slow and more then 25% of time it is unavailable. Who knows this will not happen to eBay.

I may be mistaken but doesn't eBay already use Microsoft technology. If you look at their URL you see "eBayISAPI.dll". This means they are using an ISAP DLL... probably written in C++. Dot Net seems like a logical step for them. If it makes you feel more comfortable to believe that no one can create a highly available system using Microsoft products then you have truly crossed over to the religious zealot side (who needs logic when you have faith?). The rest of us will continue to build systems in whatever language makes sense.

well, as much as I hope it doesn't fail since eBay is a good service, I hope it does. I just think it would look good on Mircosoft to have their entire hype die on them and have MS rants all over on J2EE sites. Not to mention their shares and stuff would go down.. it would be a good few weeks :)

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